Seattle Seahawks tailback Marshawn Lynch doesn’t like talking to the news media. This qualifies as controversy. You know, for members of the media.
Because sportswriters are supposed to talk to players and coaches after games to get juicy quotes, even though it’s been, how long again, since a player or coach has given anything resembling a juicy quote?
OK, sure, it happens, but on those rare occasions, it’s by mistake, and the offender is sentenced to remedial PR training of a general theme that could be summed up best by borrowing from Kevin Costner as Crash Davis from “Bull Durham.”
We gotta play ’em one day at a time. I’m just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ballclub. I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing, things will work out.
I’ve been in more than my fair share of postgame interviews with coaches and players in 20 years in sportswriting. Some well-spoken guys, some not so well-spoken, very little of substance ever actually revealed, life goes on.
I’ve also had the fortune to get to talk with several players and coaches outside of the formal interview setting. That’s where you learn stuff: over beers and wings after a mid-week baseball game, sitting in the stands with a D1 basketball coach and his son at a mid-December game with maybe 10 other fans in the gym, notebook down, tape recorder off, just talking about anything and nothing.
The intricacies of defensive shifts, taking pitches, A and B bullpens, recruiting philosophies, the mystery that is the motion offense.
My master’s in sports has come in these informal chitchats.
What I get after games is not much more than what BeastMode gives in the form of a postgame presser these days.
Why we expect players and coaches to give away the store after a game is beyond me.
So, Coach, you went zone in the second half. Why? Because Jones is hurt? Trying to disguise something? Can we expect to see more of that down the stretch?
I honestly think some sportswriters expect to get advance warning the next time a coach is thinking of running a fake field goal.
And what is a guy like Lynch supposed to say when a reporter asks, So, you know, what were you thinking when you were going in for that game-winning touchdown?
Er, well, I was thinking about who the first guy would be to ask a dumb question about what I was thinking when I was going in for the game-winning touchdown. Irony, that, isn’t it? Since you just asked that dumbass question?
Then we complain when guys like Lynch ignore our questions and kerfuffle about how he ought to consider himself damn lucky to get paid to play a kids’ game, and that the only reason anybody watches is because we write about the games to get people interested in them.
News flash: we’re pretty lucky to still get paid to write about people playing kids’ games, because people are watching the games whether we write about them or not.
And if they found out how well we get fed before the games, and how good our seats are, we might get ourselves revolted right out of our cushy jobs one day.
– Column by Chris Graham
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